Marketing is a constantly changing concept. Years ago, it meant advertising in television, radio, and newspaper but things are completely different today. The dawn of digital technology has made a huge shift on how marketing works. One that made a huge impact is social media with it being the cornerstone of modern marketing. The question is, what is social media marketing really all about?
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Table of Contents
Why Social Media Marketing?
In its most basic concept, social media marketing is what its title suggests. It is a marketing strategy that revolves around the use of social media and everything related to it. However, looking at it much deeper, it is more than that. There are a lot of concepts that surround social media marketing that makes it the topmost choice for every business.
One of the most important fundamental concepts is connecting with your audience. Social media is a two-way marketing medium. This means that as a business, you are not just exposing what you have to offer, but also hear the feedback of your customers. This two way exchange creates loyalty and allows for consistent business improvement.
However, the greatest selling point of social media marketing would always be the fact that almost everybody is into the platform. A person is likely going to have one social media account on at least one website. What this means is that this has the highest potential for audience reach compared to any other marketing medium while being the cheapest.
The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing
Getting your social media account is not all that it takes to start your marketing campaign. It is a systematic approach in order to ensure effective and efficient results. Breaking down the entire process, there are five major steps.
Strategy
Every marketing campaign starts with having a clear strategy. What do you aim to achieve and how do you intend to accomplish it? It doesn’t need to be followed all the way through. Your strategy is bound to change along the way as you come across new factors and hurdles. Generally, it is the rough sketch of the flow of your social media marketing campaign. When coming up with one, always identify these three core aspects.
Goals
What do you aim to reach at the end of your marketing campaign? Most would think this to be an obvious answer but there can be a lot of outcome. Market growth, web traffic, brand building, and customer loyalty are just some of the goals you can aim for.
It is important to know what your main priority is because one marketing campaign cannot accommodate all possible goals. Set your sights on one instead of spreading your resources on a bunch.
Social Media Platforms to Use
As you already know, there is more than one social media platform. Just like your goals, you cannot dominate every single one of them. Concentrate your attention on ones that are the most fit for what you are trying to market. Also, choose ones that are similarly related to one another.
The challenge with using different social media platforms is that the limitations that each provides. For example, using Instagram that is dependent on photos is not going to have the same approach as using Twitter which is more on phrases and thoughts.
Type of Content
Keep your sights on what your brand is all about and focus on content that revolves around it. Social media marketing is content-based. This means that what your audience associates you with is going to affect your brand image and would make it clearer who your target market is.
Planning and Publishing in Social Media Marketing
The next step to strategizing is getting things done. Social media marketing is dependent on publishing content. The more posts you make, the more engaged your followers become which in turn converts your leads to customers.
Your posts should be systematic. What you should post early on should be supported by the succeeding content you share. The cohesiveness of your material will provide a step-by-step process to your audience to grasp what your business or service is all about. Therefore, keep these two crucial criteria in mind.
Publishing Timeline
Create content in uniform intervals. The first reason is to create consistent predictable activity for your social media pages. Your audience will know when to expect new content and specifically wait for it. The second is you keep your engagement consistent, especially that a window of dullness can put questions on the quality of your social media page.
User Generated Content
The performance of your social media marketing campaign is dependent on how you lead your audience. You are going to want to have full control of what you share and what they interact with. Most social media pages fail because they allow their audience to engage a little bit too much. When users start to have conversations irrelevant to the overall goal of the page, your followers are going to feel that they are in the wrong place.
Listening and Engagement
Social media marketing is a two way medium. As a business, you are not just informing them of what you have, but they also can voice out their feedback. How you listen to what they say is a very crucial component in the success of your campaign.
The more you engage with your audience, whether it may be through comments or direct messages, the more they feel closer to the brand. In turn, this creates customer loyalty in the long run. Furthermore, being able to hear what they have to say provides ideas on avenues for improvement. You now know what your audience wants and what you should be focusing on instead of having to find that out by yourself.
Social Media Marketing Analytics and Reporting
What differentiates social media from other types of marketing mediums is how easy it is to analyze results. Being able to see the extent of your marketing campaign gives insight on what you should be doing next. You are able to make the decision of whether to continue or make necessary revisions to your strategies. With this being said, there are three ways to analyze data.
When Things are Going Wrong
It is common in marketing to get negative results than positive ones. Most of the time you are going to see reach and engagement that are below your expectation. In the event that this does happen, understand what you are doing wrong. Try to locate the source of the problem.
Most social media marketers try to overlook a negative result and continue with their current strategy. Ultimately, this ends in the same outcome and further prolongs the progress of the campaign. Therefore, remember to use negative results as a guide to making improvements.
When Things are Going Right
Data that suggest a successful marketing campaign doesn’t just call for a celebration but analysis as well. If the outcome is surprisingly high, look for the factors that may have contributed to it and use it in future campaigns. It is important to learn what are the things that you are doing right to know which aspects you should be focusing on.
Comparing with Competition
Improving on your progress is great, but looking at how your competition is doing is much better. Unless you look at the rate of growth of competing brands, you are unable to know whether you are moving at a slow or fast pace.
Learn what your competition is doing right and wrong. Build up from their experience for a more effective and efficient social media marketing campaign. Since you don’t have to go through their downfalls, you open the possibility of overtaking their progress.
Advertising
At the start of your social media marketing campaign, things are going to be quite hard. You need to be seen in order to expand the reach of your pages. No matter how great your content and engagement may be, if nobody sees your page in the first place, you are not going to grow your followers. This is where advertising comes into play.
Different social media websites provide various options for paid advertisements. You can spend as little and as much as you want. To make things better, modern web algorithms ensure that only those with the highest affinity for your product or service get to see what you are marketing. What this means is that you are not paying for ads on people that are never going to become a customer.
Advertising is going to be a necessity in most cases. If you want to expand the reach of your social media pages as soon as possible, you need to make a little investment. While the first four steps are crucial to the success of your marketing campaign, advertising alone can make as much of an impact than all of them.
Social Media Influencers
With the growth of social media came with it a new type of celebrity called social media influencers. Technically, these are people that have created a huge following through personal efforts. With their fanbase, anything that they say and do will extensively resonate throughout the online community.
So, what do they mean for your social media marketing campaign? While television celebrities are for TV ads, influencers are for social media websites. If you want to spread the reach of your product or service, making use of social media influencers can have a big and positive impact.
While most TV celebrities are social media influencers, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have as much of an influence in the online platform as the latter. Social media influencers are self-made, meaning that they don’t have a formal gauge on their value. Therefore, you can make them feature what you have to offer without breaking the bank as opposed to real celebrities.
Lastly, social media influencers are followed by people who relate closely to them. Someone who made a reputation from building desktop setups will most likely be followed by people with similar interests. So, when you are a business in the same industry, their followers are already strong potential customers.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
With so many marketing strategies available right now, what differentiates social media marketing from the competition? There are many benefits of social media marketing. There is a reason why it stands out and here are the top three of them.
Brand Building
Social media marketing is very flexible. Instead of just showing your audience what you can provide, you can build up your image as well. Your social media pages are a home to your aesthetic and the theme that you want to market. The more you provide information and emphasize what you are about, the more you build your brand.
Audience Refinement
In most cases, when you are still starting out your business, you do not have an accurate image of your audience. If you are a computer shop, you might know that you are selling computers, but to whom specifically? Are older people going to find your store appealing and friendly or is it going to be the younger generations who are looking to build powerful computers?
No matter how specific your service may be, there will always be ambiguity on your target market. With social media marketing, you are able to see what your followers are more inclined to respond to. Through this, you are able to grasp what your market is composed of. You can then make the decision on whom to target.
Social Media Marketing Creates Customer Loyalty
The strongest benefit of social media marketing is creating customer loyalty. There is nothing that makes a person come back for more than being valued. Responding to comments and answering questions are just some engagements that you can do that will make a customer feel that they are a part of something bigger.
In Conclusion
It has been a while since social media marketing has been around. A lot of businesses and people have gone into it and for good reasons. It is one of the top marketing platforms of this generation. Not getting into it is surely a lost opportunity and failure to be competitive in the current market.
You might be thinking to yourself that it is too much to handle especially if you are not too well-versed with online platforms. However, you don’t have to learn everything from scratch just to start with social media marketing. Just simply acquire the services of the best social media marketing companies, contact us today for a free strategy consultation.
